State and Counter-Revolution

Lenin’s state was to be a Bolshevik state supported by workers and peasants.
As the privileged classes could not be expected to support it, it was necessary
to disfranchise them and thus end bourgeois democracy. Once in power, the
Bolsheviks restricted political freedoms – freedom of speech, press, assembly,
and association, and the right to vote and to be elected to the soviets – to the
laboring population, that is, to all people “who have acquired the means of
living through labor that is productive and useful to society, that is, the
laborers and employees of all classes who are employed in industry, trade,
agriculture, etc., and to peasants and Cossack agricultural laborers who employ
no help for purposes of making profits.” (1) However, the peasants could not be
integrated into the envisioned “one great factory,” which transformed “all
citizens into the hired employees of the state,” for they had made their
revolution for “private property,” for land of their own, disregarding the fact
that nominally all land belonged to the nation as a whole. The concessions made
to the peasants were the price the Bolsheviks had to pay for their support. “The
Russian peasantry,” wrote Trotsky, “will be interested in upholding proletarian
rule at least in the first, most difficult, period, no less than were the French
peasants interested in upholding the military role of Napoleon Bonaparte, who by
force guaranteed to the new owners the integrity of their land shares.” (2)

But the peasants’ political support of the Bolsheviks was one thing and their
economic interests another. Disorganization through war and civil war reduced
industrial and agricultural production. The large landed estates had been broken
up to provide millions of agricultural laborers with small holdings. Subsistence
farming largely displaced commercial farming. But even the market-oriented
peasantry refused to turn its surpluses over to the state, as the latter had
little or nothing to offer in return. The internal policies of the Bolshevik
state were mainly determined by its relation to the peasantry, which did not fit
into the evolving state-capitalist economy. To placate the peasants was possible
only at the expense of the proletariat, and to favor the latter, only at the
expense of the peasantry. To stay in power, the Bolsheviks were constantly
forced to alter their positions regarding either one or the other class.
Ultimately, in order to make themselves independent of both, they resorted to
terroristic measures which subjected the whole of the population to their
dictatorial rule.

The Bolshevik dilemma with regard to the peasants was quite generally
recognized. Despite her sympathies for the Bolshevik Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg,
for example, could not desist from criticizing their agricultural policies as
detrimental to the quest for socialism. Property rights, in her view, must be
turned over to the nation, or the state, for only then is it possible to
organize agricultural production on a socialistic basis. The Bolshevik slogan
"immediate seizure and distribution of the land to the peasants” was not a
socialist measure but one that, by creating a new form of private property, cut
off the way to such measures. The Leninist agrarian reform, she wrote, “has
created a new and powerful layer of popular enemies of socialism in the
countryside, enemies whose resistance will be much more dangerous and stubborn
than that of the noble large landowners.” (3) This criticism, however, did no
more than restate the unavoidable dilemma. While she favored the taking of power
by the Bolsheviks, Luxemburg recoiled before the conditions under which alone
this was possible. Lenin, however, expected the peasants’ continuing support not
only because the Bolsheviks had ratified their seizure of land, but also because
the Soviet state intended to be a “cheap government,” in order to ease the
peasants’ tax burden.

It is partly with this “cheap government” in mind that Lenin spoke so
repetitiously of the necessity of “workingmen’s wages” for all the
administrative and technical functionaries. “Cheap government” was to cement
together the “workers’ and peasants’ alliance.” During the first period of
Bolshevik rule, moreover, the egalitarian principles enunciated in State and
Revolution became largely a reality, due to the difficulties in the way of
providing the urban population with the bare necessities of life. The government
saw itself forced to take from the peasantry all their surplus grain, and often
more than that, in the form of “loans,” or in exchange for valueless paper
money. Their violent reactions induced the Bolsheviks to replace the system of
confiscation with a tax in kind, which failed to still the peasants’ opposition.
Finally, in 1921 the government was forced into a New Economic Policy (NEP),
involving a partial return to capitalist market relations and an attempt to
attract capital from abroad.

The invitation to invest in Russian industry was largely ignored by Western
capitalism. The problem remained how to capitalize the country without ending up
with a private-enterprise system – the logical outcome of a development of
peasant farming under free market relations. The New Economic Policy could be
regarded either as a mere interval in the “socialization process” or as a more
permanent policy entailing the risk that the newly generating private capitalist
forces would overtake the state-controlled sector of the economy and even
destroy it. In such an eventuality, the Bolshevik intervention would have been
in vain – a mere incident in a bourgeois revolution. Lenin felt sure, however,
that a partial return to market relations could be politically mastered, i.e.,
that the Bolshevik Party could hold state power and secure enough economic
weight by maintaining control of key positions, such as large-scale industry,
banking, and foreign trade, thus neutralizing the emerging private property
relations in agriculture, small-scale industry, and the retail trade. In time,
the real social power would shift from the peasantry to state-controlled
industry by virtue of the latter’s growth.

In the end, however, the problems of the “mixed economy” of the NEP period
were resolved by the forced collectivization of agriculture, the centrally
planned economy, and the terroristic regime of Stalinism. The fears of Rosa
Luxemburg with respect to Bolshevik peasant policy proved to be unwarranted.
However, the destruction of peasant property by way of collectivization did not
lead to socialism but merely secured the continuance of state capitalism. By
itself, the collectivized form of agriculture has no socialist character. It is
merely the transformation of small-scale into large-scale agricultural
production by political means in distinction to the concentration and
centralization process brought about, though imperfectly, in the capitalist
market economy. Collectivization was to make possible a more effective
extraction of surplus labor from the peasant population. It required a
"revolution from above,” a veritable war between the government and the
peasantry, (4) wherein the government falsely claimed to act on behalf of and to
be aided by the poor peasants, in wiping out the kulaks, or rich peasants, who
were blocking the road to socialism.

Unless for higher wages, implying better living standards, wage workers see
no point in exerting themselves beyond that unavoidable measure demanded by
their bosses. Supervision, too, demands incentives. The new controllers of labor
showed little interest in the improvement of production at “workingmen’s wages.”
The negative incentive, implied in the need for employment in order to live at
all, was not enough to spur the supervisory and technical personnel to greater
efforts. It was therefore soon supplemented with the positive incentives of wage
and salary differentials between and within the various occupations and
professions, and with special privileges for particularly effective
performances. These differentials were progressively increased until they came
to resemble those prevalent in private-enterprise economies.

But to return to the Bolshevik government: Elected by the soviets, it was in
theory subordinated to, and subject to recall by, the All-Russian Congress of
Soviets, and merely empowered to carry on within the framework of its
directives. In practice, it played an independent role in coping with the
changing political and economic needs and the everyday business of government.
The Congress of Soviets was not a permanent body, but met at intervals of
shorter or longer duration, delegating legislative and executive powers to the
organs of the state. With the “carrying of the class struggle into the rural
districts,” i.e., with the state-organized expropriatory expeditions in the
countryside and the installation of Bolshevik “committees of the poor” in the
villages, the “workers’ and peasants’ alliance” that had brought the Bolsheviks
to power promised to deteriorate and to endanger the Bolshevik majority in the
congress as well as its partnership with the left Social Revolutionaries. To be
sure, the Bolshevik government, controlling the state apparatus, could have
ignored the congress, or driven it away, as it had driven away the Constituent
Assembly. But the Bolsheviks preferred to work within the framework of the
soviet system, and to work toward a Congress of Soviets obedient to the party.
To this end, it was necessary to control the elections of deputies to the
soviets and to outlaw other political parties, most of all the traditional party
of peasants, the Social Revolutionaries.

As the Mensheviks and the right Social Revolutionaries had withdrawn from the
congress and opposed the government elected by it, they could easily be
disfranchised, and were outlawed by order of the Central Committee of the
Congress of Soviets in June 1918. The occasion to put an end to the left Social
Revolutionaries arose soon, not only because of the widespread peasant
discontent but also because of political differences, among which was the Social
Revolutionaries’ rejection of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty. After the signing
of the treaty, the left Social Revolutionaries withdrew from the Central
Committee. The Fifth Congress of Soviets, in July 1918, expelled the left Social
Revolutionaries. Both the Central Committee and the Council of People’s
Commissars were now exclusively in Bolshevik hands. The latter secured their
majority in the soviets not only because their popularity was still in the
ascendancy, but also because they had learned how to make it increasingly more
difficult for non-Bolsheviks to enter the soviets. In time, the All-Russian
Congress of Soviets became a manipulated body, automatically ratifying the
actions of the government. The abdication of soviet power in favor of
governmental rule, which Lenin had denounced with the slogan “All power to the
soviets,” was now for the first time actually realized in the Bolshevik
one-party government.

With the soviets no longer thought of as the organizational instrument for a
socialist production system, they became a kind of substitute parliament. The
soviet state, it was proclaimed programmatically,

“while affording the toiling masses incomparably greater
opportunities than those enjoyed under bourgeois democracy and parliamentary
government, to elect and recall deputies in the manner easiest and most
accessible to the workers and peasants,... at the same time abolishes the
negative aspects of parliamentary government, especially the separation of the
legislature and the executive, the isolation of the representative
institutions from the masses.... The Soviet government draws the state
apparatus closer to the masses by the fact that the electoral constituency and
the basic unit for the state is no longer a territorial district, but an
industrial unit (workshop, factory).” (5)

The soviet system was seen by the Bolsheviks as a “transmission belt”
connecting the state authorities at the top with the broad masses at the bottom.
Orders issuing from above would be carried out below, and complaints and
suggestions from the workers would reach the government through their deputies
to the Congress of Soviets. Meanwhile, Bolshevik party cells and Bolshevik
domination of the trade unions assured a more direct control within the
enterprises and provided a link between the cadres in the factories and the
governmental institutions. If so inclined, of course, the workers could assume
that there was a connection between them and the government through the soviets,
and that the latter could, via the electoral system, actually determine
government policy and even change governments. This illusory assumption pervades
more or less all electoral systems and could also be held for that of the
soviets. By shifting the electoral constituency from the territorial district to
the place of production, the Bolsheviks did deprive the nonworking layers of
society of partaking in the parliamentary game, (6) without, however, changing
the game itself. In the name of revolutionary necessity, the government made
itself increasingly more independent of the soviets in order to achieve that
centralization of power needed for the domination of society by a single
political party. Even with Bolshevik domination of the soviets, general control
was to be administered by the party and there, according to Trotsky,

the last word belongs to the Central Committee.... This affords
extreme economy of time and energy, and in the most difficult and complicated
circumstances gives a guarantee for the necessary unity of action. Such a
regime is possible only in the presence of the unquestioned authority of the
party, and the faultlessness of its discipline. ... The exclusive role of the
Communist Party under the conditions of a victorious revolution is quite
comprehensible.... The revolutionary supremacy of the proletariat presupposes
within the proletariat itself the political supremacy of the party, with a
clear programme of action. ... We have more than once been accused of having
substituted for the dictatorship of the Soviets the dictatorship of our party.
Yet it can be said with complete justice that the dictatorship of the Soviets
became possible only by means of the dictatorship of the party. It is thanks
to the clarity of its theoretical vision and its strong revolutionary
organization that the party has afforded to the Soviets the possibility of
becoming transformed from shapeless parliaments of labor into the apparatus of
the supremacy of labor. In this “substitution” of the power of the party for
the power of the working class there is nothing accidental, and in reality
there is no substitution at all. The Communists express the fundamental
interests of the working class. It is quite natural that, in the period in
which history brings up those interests,.., the Communists have become the
recognized representatives of the working class as a whole. (7)

Whereas with regard to the soviets of 1905, Trotsky recognized that their
"substance was their efforts to become organs of public authority,” now, after
the Bolshevik victory, it was no longer the soviets but the party and, more
precisely, its central committee, that had to exercise all public authority. (8)
The Bolsheviks, or at any rate their foremost spokesmen, Lenin and Trotsky, had
no confidence whatever in the soviets, those “shapeless parliaments of labor,”
which, in their view, owed their very existence to the Bolshevik Party. Because
there would be no soviet system at all without the party, to speak of a soviet
dictatorship was to speak of the party dictatorship – the one implying the other.
Actually, of course, it had been the other way around, for without the
revolution made by the soviets the Bolshevik Party could never have seized power
and Lenin would still have been in Switzerland. Yet to hold this power, the
party now had to separate itself from the soviets and to control the latter
instead of being controlled by them.

Notwithstanding the demagoguery displayed in State and Revolution,
Lenin’s and Trotsky’s attitude regarding the capacities and incapacities of the
working class were not at all surprising, for they were largely shared by the
leading “elites” of all socialist movements and served, in fact, to justify
their existence and privileges. The social and technical division of labor
within the capitalist system did indeed deprive the proletariat of any control,
and therewith understanding, of the complex production and distribution process
that assures the reproduction of the social system. Although a socialist system
of production will have a division of labor different from that prevalent in
capitalism, the new arrangements involved will only be established in time and
in connection with a total reorientation of the production process and its
direction toward goals different from those characteristic of capitalism. It is
therefore only to be expected that the production process will be disrupted in
any revolutionary situation, especially when the productive apparatus is already
in a state of decay, as was the case in the Russia of 1917. It is then also not
surprising that workers should have put their hopes in the new government to
accomplish for them what seemed extremely difficult for them to do.

The identification of soviets and party was clearly shared by the workers and
the Bolsheviks, for otherwise the early dominance of the latter within the
soviets would not be comprehensible. It was even strong enough to allow the
Bolsheviks to monopolize the soviets by underhanded methods that kept
non-Bolsheviks out of them. For the broad urban masses the Bolsheviks were
indeed their party, which proved its revolutionary character precisely by its
support of the soviets and by its insistence upon the dictatorship of the
proletariat. There can also be no doubt that the Bolsheviks, who were, after
all, convinced socialists, were deadly serious in their devotion to the workers’
cause – so much, indeed, that they were ready to defend it even against the
workers should they fail to recognize its necessary requirements.

According to the Bolsheviks, these necessary requirements, i.e., “work,
discipline, order,” could not be left to the self-enforcement of the soviets.
The state, the Bolshevik Party in this case, would regulate all important
economic matters by government ordinances having the force of law. The
construction of the state served no other purpose than that of safeguarding the
revolution and the construction of socialism. They spread this illusion among
the workers with such great conviction because it was their own, for they were
convinced that socialism could be instituted through state control and the
selfless idealism of a revolutionary elite. They must have felt terribly
disappointed when the workers did not properly respond to the urgency of the
call for “work, discipline, and order” and to their revolutionary rhetoric. If
the workers could not recognize their own interests, this recognition would have
to be forced upon them, if necessary by terroristic means. The chance for
socialism should not be lost by default. Sure only of their own revolutionary
vocation, they insisted upon their exclusive right to determine the ways and
means to the socialist reconstruction of society.

However, this exclusive right demanded unshared absolute power. The first
thing to be organized, apart from party and soviets, was then the Cheka, the
political police, to fight the counterrevolution in all its manifestations and
all attempts to unseat the Bolshevik government. Revolutionary tribunals
assisted the work of the Cheka. Concentration camps were installed for the
enemies of the regime. A Red Army, under Trotsky’s command,.took the place of
the “armed proletariat.” An effective army, obedient only to the government,
could not be run by “soldiers’ councils,” which were thus at once eliminated.
The army was to fight both external and internal foes and was led and organized
by “specialists,” by tsarist officers, that is, who had made their peace with
the Bolshevik government. Because the army emerged victorious out of war and
civil war, which lasted from 1918 to 1920, the Bolshevik government’s prestige
was enormously enhanced and assured the consolidation of its authoritarian rule.

Far from endangering the Bolshevik regime, war and civil war against foreign
intervention and the White counter-revolution strengthened it. It united all who
were bound to suffer by a return of the old authorities. Regardless of their
attitude toward the Bolsheviks and their policies, the peasants were now
defending their newly won land, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries their
very lives. The Bolsheviks, at first rent by internal dissension, united in the
face of the common enemy and, if only for the duration of the civil war, gladly
accepted the aid of the harassed but still existing Mensheviks, Social
Revolutionaries, and even Anarchists as that of a “loyal opposition.” Finally,
the interventionist character of the civil war gave the Bolshevik resistance the
euphoria of nationalism as the government rallied the population to its side
with the slogan “the fatherland is in danger.” In this connection it must be
pointed out that Lenin’s and so the Bolsheviks’ nationalism and internationalism
were of a peculiar kind, in that they could be used alternatively to advance the
fortunes of the Russian revolution and those of the Bolshevik Party. In
Trotsky’s words, “Lenin’s internationalism needs no recommendation. But at the
same time Lenin himself is profoundly national. Lenin personifies the Russian
proletariat, a young class, which politically is scarcely older than Lenin
himself, but a class which is profoundly national, for recapitulated in it is
the entire past development of Russia, in it lies Russia’s entire future, with
it the Russian nation rises and falls.” (9) Perhaps, being so profoundly
national, mere introspection may have led Lenin to appreciate the national needs
and cultural peculiarities of oppressed peoples sufficiently to induce him to
advocate their national liberation and self-determination, up to the point of
secession, as one aspect of his anti-imperialism and as an application of the
democratic principle to the question of nationalities. Since Marx and Engels had
favored the liberation of Poland and home rule for Ireland, he found himself
here in the best of company. But Lenin was a practical politician first of all,
even though he could fulfill this role only at this late hour. As a practical
politician he had realized that the many suppressed nationalities within the
Russian Empire presented a constant threat to the tsarist regime, which could be
utilized for its overthrow. To be sure, Lenin was also an internationalist and
saw the socialist revolution as a world revolution. Still, this revolution had
to begin somewhere and in the context of the Russian multinational state, the
demand for national self-determination promised the winning of “allies” in the
struggle against tsardom. This strategy was supported by the hope that, once
free, the different nationalities would elect to remain within the Russian
Commonwealth, either out of self-interest or through the urgings of their own
socialist organizations, should they succeed in gaining governmental power.
Analogous to the “voluntary union of communes into a nation,” which Marx had
seen as a possible outcome of the Paris Commune, national self-determination
could lead to a unified socialist Russian Federation of Nations more cohesive
than the old imperial regime.

Until the Russian Revolution, however, the problem of national
self-determination remained purely academic. Even after the revolution, the
granting of self-determination to the various nationalities within the Russian
Empire was rather meaningless, for most of the territories involved were
occupied by foreign powers. Self-determination had meanwhile become a policy
instrument of the Entente powers, in order to hasten the break-up of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire and an imperialistic redrawing of the map of Europe in
accordance with the desires of the victor nations. But “even at the risk of
playing into bourgeois hands, Lenin nevertheless continued to promote
unqualified self-determination, precisely because he was convinced that the war
would compel both the Dual Monarchy and the Russian Empire to surrender to the
force of nationalism.” (10) By sponsoring self-determination and thereby making
the proletariat a supporter of nationalism, Lenin, as Rosa Luxemburg pointed
out, was merely aiding the bourgeoisie to turn the principle of
self-determination into an instrument of counter-revolution. Although this was
actually the case, the Bolshevik regime continued to press for national
self-determination by now projecting it to the international scene, in order to
weaken other imperialist powers, in particular England, in an attempt to foster
colonial revolutions against Western capitalism, which threatened to destroy the
Bolshevik state.

Though Rosa Luxemburg’s prediction, that the granting of self-determination
to the various nationalities in Russia would merely surround the Bolshevik state
with a cordon of reactionary counterrevolutionary countries, turned out to be
correct, this was so only for the short run. Rosa Luxemburg failed to see that
it was less the principle of self-determination that dictated Bolshevik policy
than the force of circumstances over which they had no control. At the first
opportunity they began whittling away at the self-determination of nations,
finally to end up by incorporating all the lost independent nations in a
restored Russian Empire and, in addition, forging for themselves spheres of
interest in extra-Russian territories. On the strength of her own theory of
imperialism, Rosa Luxemburg should have realized that Lenin’s theory could not
be applied in a world of competing imperialist powers, and would not need to be
applied, should capitalism be brought down by an international revolution.

The civil war in Russia was waged mainly to arrest the centrifugal forces of
nationalism, released by war and revolution, which threatened the integrity of
Russia. Not only at her western borders, in Finland, Poland, and the Baltic
nations, but also to the south, in Georgia, as well as in the eastern provinces
of Asiatic Russia, new independent states established themselves outside of
Bolshevik control. The February Revolution had broken the barriers that had held
back the nationalist or regionalist movements in the non-Russian parts of the
Empire. “When the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government in Petrograd
and Moscow, nationalist or regionalist governments took over in the non-Great
Russian areas of European Russia and in Siberia and Central Asia. The governing
institutions of the Moslem peoples of the Transvolga (Tatars, Bashkirs), of
Central Asia and Transcaspia (Kirghiz, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Turkomans), and of
Transcaucasia (Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaidzhanis, Tartars) favored autonomy
in a Russian federation and opposed the Bolsheviks.” (11) These peoples had to
be reconquered in the ensuing civil war.

The nationalist aspect of the civil war was used for revolutionary and
counter-revolutionary purposes. The White counter-revolution began its
anti-Bolshevik struggle soon after the overthrow of the Provisional Government.
Volunteer armies were formed to fight the Bolsheviks and were financed and
equipped by the Entente powers in an effort to bring Russia back into the war
against Germany. British, French, Japanese, and American troops landed in
Murmansk, Archangel, and Vladivostok. The Czech Legion entered the conflict
against the Bolsheviks. In these struggles, territories changed hands frequently
but the counter-revolutionary forces, though aided by the Allied powers, proved
no match for the newly organized Red Army. The foreign intervention continued
even after the armistice between the Allied powers and Germany, and, with the
consent of the Allies, the Germans fought in support of the counter-revolution
in the Baltic nations, which led to the destruction of the revolutionary forces
in these countries and the Soviet government’s recognition of their
independence. Poland regained its independence as an anti-Bolshevik state.
However, the counter-revolutionary forces were highly scattered and
disorganized. The Allied powers could not agree among themselves on the extent
of their intervention and on the specific goals to be reached. Neither did they
trust the willingness of their own troops to continue the war in Russia, nor in
the acquiescence of their own population in a prolonged and large-scale war for
the overthrow of the Bolshevik regime. The decisive military defeat of the
various White armies induced the Allied powers to withdraw their troops in the
autumn of 1918, thus opening the occupied parts of Russia to the Red Army. The
French and British troops withdrew from the Ukraine and the Caucasus in the
spring of 1919. American pressure led to the evacuation of the Japanese in 1922.
But the Bolsheviks had definitely won the civil war by 1920. While the
revolution had been a national affair, the counter-revolution had been truly
international. But even so, it failed to dislodge the Bolshevik regime.

Lenin and Trotsky, not to speak of Marx and Engels, had been convinced that
without a proletarian revolution in the West, a Russian revolution could not
lead to socialism. Without direct political aid from the European proletariat,
Trotsky said more than once, the working class of Russia would not be able to
turn its temporary supremacy into a permanent socialist dictatorship. The
reasons for this he saw not only in the opposition on the part of the world
reaction, but also in Russia’s internal conditions, as the Russian working
class, left to its own resources, would necessarily be crushed the moment it
lost the support of the peasantry, a most likely occurrence should the
revolution remain isolated. Lenin, too, set his hopes on a westward spreading of
the revolution, which might otherwise be crushed by the capitalist powers. But he
did not share Trotsky’s view that an isolated Russia would succumb to its own
internal contradictions. In an article written in 1915, concerned with the
advisability of including in the socialist program the demand for a United
States of Europe, he pointed out, first, that socialism is a question of world
revolution and not one restricted to Europe and second, that such a slogan

may be wrongly interpreted to mean that the victory of
socialism in a single country is impossible, and it may also create
misconceptions as to the relations of such a country to the others. Uneven
economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence,
the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one
capitalist country alone. After expropriating the capitalists and organizing
their own socialist production, the victorious proletariat of that country
will arise against the rest of the world – the capitalist world – attracting to
its cause the oppressed classes of other countries, stirring uprisings in
those countries against the capitalists, and in case of need using even armed
force against the exploiting classes and their states. (12)

Obviously, Lenin was convinced – and all his decisions after the seizure of
power attest to this – that even an isolated revolutionary Russia would be able
to maintain itself unless directly overthrown by the capitalist powers.
Eventually, of course, the struggle between socialism and capitalism would
resume, but perhaps under conditions more favorable for the international
working class. For the time being, however, it was essential to stay in power no
matter what the future might hold in store.

The world revolution did not materialize, and the nation-state remained the
field of operation for economic development as well as for the class struggle.
After 1920 the Bolsheviks no longer expected an early resumption of the world
revolutionary process and settled down for the consolidation of their own
regime. The exigencies and privations of the civil war years are usually held
responsible for the Bolshevik dictatorship and its particular harshness. While
this is true, it is no less true that the civil war and its victorious outcome
facilitated and assured the success of the dictatorship. The party dictatorship
was not only the inevitable result of an emergency situation, but was already
implied in the conception of “proletarian rule” as the rule of the Bolshevik
Party. The end of the civil war led not to a relaxation of the dictatorship but
to its intensification; it was now, after the crushing of the
counter-revolution, directed exclusively against the “loyal opposition” and the
working class itself. Already at the Eighth Congress of the Bolshevik Party, in
March 1919, the demand was made to end the toleration of opposition parties. But
it was not until the summer of 1921 that the Bolshevik government finally
decided to destroy all independent political organizations and the oppositional
groups within its own ranks as well.

In the spring of 1920 it seemed clear that the military balance in the civil
war favored the Bolsheviks. This situation led to a resurgence of the opposition
to the regime and to the draconian measures it had used during the war. Peasant
unrest became so strong as to force the government to discontinue its
expropriatory excursions into the countryside and to disband the “committees of
the poor peasants.” The workers objected to the famine conditions prevailing in
the cities and to the relentless drive for more production through a wave of
strikes and demonstrations that culminated in the Kronstadt uprising. As the
expectations of the workers had once been based on the existence of the
Bolshevik government, it was now this government that had to take the blame for
all their miseries and disappointments. This government had become a repressive
dictatorship and could no longer be influenced by democratic means via the
soviet system. To free the soviets from their party yoke and turn them once
again into instruments of proletarian self-rule required now a “third
revolution.” The Kronstadt rebellion was not directed against the soviet system
but intended to restore it to its original form. The call for “free soviets”
implied soviets freed from the one-party rule of Bolshevism; consequently, it
implied political liberty for all proletarian and peasant organizations and
tendencies that took part in the Russian Revolution. (13)

It was no accident that the widespread opposition to Bolshevik rule found its
most outspoken expression at Kronstadt. It was here that the soviets had become
the sole public authority long before this became a temporary reality in
Petrograd, Moscow, and the nation as a whole. Already in May 1917 the Bolsheviks
and left Social Revolutionaries held the majority in the Kronstadt Soviet and
declared their independence vis-à-vis the Provisional Government. Although the
latter succeeded in extracting some kind of formal recognition from the
Kronstadt Soviet, the latter nonetheless remained the only public authority
within its territory and thus helped to prepare the way for the Bolshevik
seizure of power. It was the radical commitment to the soviet system, as the
best form of proletarian democracy, that now set the Kronstadt workers and
soldiers against the Bolshevik dictatorship in an attempt to regain their
self-determination.

It could not be helped, of course, that the Kronstadt mutiny was lauded by
all opponents of Bolshevism and thus also by reactionaries and bourgeois
liberals, who in this way provided the Bolsheviks with a lame excuse for their
vicious reaction to the rebellion. But this unsolicited opportunistic verbal
“support” cannot alter the fact that the goal of the rebellion was the
restoration of that soviet system which the Bolsheviks themselves had seen fit
to propagandize in 1917. The Bolsheviks knew quite well that Kronstadt was not
the work of “White generals,” but they could not admit that, from the point of
view of soviet power, they had themselves become a counter-revolutionary force
in the very process of strengthening and defending their government. Therefore,
they had not only to drown in blood this last attempt at a revival of the soviet
system, but had to slander it as the work of the “White counter-revolution.”
Actually, even though the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries lent their
“moral” support to the rebellion, the workers and sailors engaged in it had no
intentions of resurrecting the Constituent Assembly, which they regarded as a
stillborn affair of the irrevocable past. The time, they said, “has come to
overthrow the commissarocracy. ... Kronstadt has raised the banner of the
uprising for a Third Revolution of the toilers. ... The autocracy has fallen. The
Constituent Assembly has departed to the region of the damned. The
commissarocracy is crumbling.” (14) The “third revolution” was to fulfill the
broken promises of the preceding one.

With the Kronstadt rebellion the disaffection of workers and peasants had
spread to the armed forces, and this combination made it particularly dangerous
to the Bolshevik regime. But the rebellion held no realizable promise, not
because it was crushed by the Bolsheviks but because, had it succeeded, it would
not have been able to sustain and extend a libertarian socialism based on soviet
rule. It was indeed condemned to be what it has been called: the Kronstadt
Commune. Like its Paris counterpart, it remained isolated despite the general
discontent, and its political objectives could not be reached under the
prevailing Russian conditions. Yet it was able to hasten Lenin’s “strategic
retreat” to the New Economic Policy, which relaxed the Bolshevik economic
dictatorship while simultaneously tightening its political authoritarian rule.

The workers’ dissatisfaction with Lenin’s dictatorship found some
repercussion in his own party. Oppositional groups criticized not only specific
party decisions, such as state control of trade unions, but also the general
trend of Bolshevik policy. On the question of “one-man management,” for
instance, it was said that this was a matter not of a tactical problem but of
two “historically irreconcilable points of view,” for

“one-man management is a product of the individualistic
conception of the bourgeois class ... This idea finds its reflection in all
spheres of human endeavor – beginning with the appointment of a sovereign for
the state and ending with a sovereign director in the factory. This is the
supreme wisdom of bourgeois thought. The bourgeoisie do not believe in the
power of a collective body. They like only to whip the masses into an obedient
flock, and drive them wherever their unrestricted will desires. The basis of
the controversy (in the Bolshevik Party) is mainly this: whether we shall
realize communism through the workers or over their heads by the hand of the
Soviet officials. And let us ponder whether it is possible to attain and build
a communist economy by the hands and creative abilities of the scions from the
other class, who are imbued with their routine of the past? If we begin to
think as Marxians, as men of science, we shall answer categorically and
explicitly – no. The administrative economic body in the labor republic during
the present transitory period must be a body directly elected by the producers
themselves. All the rest of the administrative economic Soviet institutions
shall serve only as executive center of the economic policy of that
all-important economic body of the labor republic. All else is goose stepping
that manifests distrust toward all creative abilities of workers, distrust
which is not compatible with the professed ideals of our party... There can be
no self-activity without freedom of thought and opinion, for self-activity
manifests itself not only in initiative, action, and work, but in
independent thought as well. We are afraid of action, we have ceased to
rely on the masses, hence we have bureaucracy with us. In order to do away
with the bureaucracy that is finding its shelter in the Soviet institutions,
we must first of all get rid of all bureaucracy in the party itself.(15)

Apparently, these oppositionists did not understand their own party or, in
view of its actual practice, diverged from its principles as outlined by Lenin
since 1903. Perhaps they had taken State and Revolution at face value,
not noticing its ambivalence, and felt now betrayed, as Lenin’s policy revealed
the sheer demagoguery of its revolutionary declarations. It should have been
evident from Lenin’s concept of the party and its role in the revolutionary
process that, once in power, this party could only function in a dictatorial
way. Quite apart from the specific Russian conditions, the idea of the party as
the consciousness of the socialist revolution clearly relegated all decision
making power to the Bolshevik state apparatus.

True to his own principles, Lenin put a quick end to the oppositionists by
ordaining all factions to disband under threat of expulsion. With two
resolutions, passed by the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party, March
1921, “On Party Unity” and “On the Syndicalist and Anarchist Deviation in our
Party,” Lenin succeeded in completing what had hitherto only approximately been
accomplished, namely, an end to all factionalism within the party and the
securing of complete control over it through the Central Committee, which, in
addition, was itself reorganized in such a fashion as to get rid of any
opposition that might arise within the party leadership. With this was laid a
groundwork on which nothing else could be built but the emerging omnipotence of
the rising bureaucracy of party and state and the infinite power of the supreme
leader presiding over both. The one-man rule of the party, which had been an
informal fact due to the overriding “moral” authority of Lenin, turned into the
unassailable fact of personal rule by whoever should manage to put himself at
the top of the party hierarchy.

The bourgeois character of Bolshevik rule, as noted by its internal
opposition, reflected the objectively nonsocialist nature of the Russian
Revolution. It was a sort of “bourgeois revolution” without the bourgeoisie, as
it was a proletarian revolution without a sufficiently large proletariat, a
revolution in which the historical functions of the Western bourgeoisie were
taken up by an apparently anti-bourgeois party by means of its assumption of
political power. Under these conditions, the revolutionary content of Western
Marxism was not applicable, not even in a modified form. Whatever one may think
of Marx’s declaration concerning the Paris Commune – that the “political rule of
the proletariat is incompatible with the externalization of their social
servitude” (a situation quite difficult to conceive, except as a momentary
possibility, that is, as the revolution itself) – Marx at least spoke of the
"producers,” not of a political party substituting for the producers, whereas
the Bolshevik concept speaks of state rule alone as the necessary and sufficient
prerequisite for the transformation of the capitalist into a socialist mode of
production. The producers are controlled by the state, the state by the party,
the party by the central committee, and the last by the supreme leader and his
court. The destroyed autocracy is resurrected in the name of Marxism. In this
way, moreover, ideologically as well as practically, the revolution and
socialism depend finally on the history-making individual.

Indeed, it did not take long for the Russian Revolution and its consequences
to be seen as the work of the geniuses Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin; not only in
the bourgeois view, to which this comes naturally, but also quite generally by
socialists claiming adherence to the materialist conception of history, which
finds its dynamic not in the exceptional abilities of individuals, but in the
struggle of classes in the course of the developing social forces of production.
Neither Marx nor any reasonable person would deny the role of the “hero” in
history, whether for better or for worse; for, as previously pointed out, the
“hero” is already implicit in class society and is himself, in his thoughts and
actions, determined by the class contradictions that rend society. In his
historical writings, for instance, Marx dealt extensively with such “heroes,”
like the little Napoleon, who brought ruin to his country, or, like Bismarck,
who finished the goal of German unification, left undone by the stillborn
bourgeois revolution. It is quite conceivable that without Napoleon III and
without Bismarck the history of France and Germany would have been different
from what it actually was, but this difference would have altered nothing in the
socioeconomic development of both countries, determined as it was by the
capitalist relations of production and the expansion of capital as an
international phenomenon.

What is history anyway? The bourgeoisie has no theory of history, as it has
no theory of social development. Since it merely describes what is observable or
may be found in old records, history is everything and nothing at the same time
and any of its surface manifestations may be emphasized in lieu of an
explanation, which must always serve the social power relations existing at any
particular time. Like economics, bourgeois history is pure ideology and gives no
inkling of the reasons for social change. And, just as the market economy can
only be understood through the understanding of its underlying class relations,
so does this kind of history require another kind if its meaning is to be
revealed. From a Marxian point of view, history implies changing social
relations of production. That history which concerns itself exclusively with
alterations in an otherwise static society, as interesting as it may be,
concerns Marxism only insofar as these changes indicate the hidden process by
which one mode of production releases social forces that point to the rise of
another mode of production. From this point of view, the historical changes
brought about by the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik regime have their
place within an otherwise unaltered mode of production, as its social relations
remained capital-labor relations, even though capital – that is, control over the
means of production – and with it wage labor were taken out of the hands of
private entrepreneurs and placed in those of a state bureaucracy performing the
exploitative functions of the former. The capitalist system was modified but not
abolished. The history made by the Bolsheviks was still capitalist history in
the ideological disguise of Marxism.

The existence of “great men” in history is a sure indication that history is
being made within the hierarchical structure of class-ridden competitive
societies. The Lenin cult, the Hitler cult, the Stalin cult, etc., represent
attempts to deprive the mass of the population of any kind of self-determination
and also to ensure their complete atomization, which makes this technically
possible. Such cults have little to do with the “great men” themselves, as
personalities, but reflect the need or desire for complete conformity to allow a
particular class or a particular political movement sufficient control over
broad masses for the realization of their specific objectives, such as war, or
making a revolution. “Great men” require “great times,” and both emerge in
crisis situations that have their roots in the exaggeration of society’s
fundamental contradictions.

The helplessness of the atomized individual finds a sort of imaginary solace
in the mere symbolization of his self-assertion in the leadership, or the
leader, of a social movement claiming to do for him what he cannot do for
himself. The impotence of the social individual is the potency of the individual
who manages to represent one or another kind of historically given social
aspiration. The anti-social character of the capitalist system accounts for its
apparent social coherence in the symbolized form of the state, the government,
the great leader. However, the symbolization must be constantly reinforced by
the concrete forms of control executed by the ruling minority.

It is almost certain that without Lenin’s arrival in Russia the Bolsheviks
would not have seized governmental power, and in this sense the credit for the
Bolshevik Revolution must be given to Lenin – or perhaps, to the German General
Staff, or to Parvus, who made Lenin’s entry into the Russian Revolution
possible. But what would have happened in Russia without the “subjective factor”
of Lenin’s existence? The totally discredited tsarist regime had already been
overthrown and would not have been resurrected by a counter-revolutio nary coup
in the face of the combined and general opposition of workers, peasants, the
bourgeoisie, and even segments of the old autocratic regime. In addition, the
Entente powers, relieved of the alliance with the anachronistic Russian
autocratic regime, favored the new and ostensibly democratic government, if only
in the hope of a more efficiently waged war against the Central European
“anti-democratic” powers. Although attempts were made to resume the offensive in
the west, they were not successful, and merely intensified the desire for an
early peace, even a separate peace, in order to consolidate the new regime and
to restore some modicum of order within the increasing social anarchy. A
counter-revolution would have had as its object the forced continuation of the
war and the elimination of the soviets and the Bolsheviks, to safeguard the
private-property nature of the social production relations. In short, the
“dictatorship of the proletariat” would most probably have been overthrown by a
dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, enforced by a White terror and other fascist
methods of rule. A different political system and different property relations
would have evolved, but on the basis of the same production relations that
sustained the Bolshevik state.

Similarly, there is little doubt that World War II was initiated by Adolf
Hitler in an attempt to win World War I by a second try for German control of
capitalist Europe. Without Hitler, the second war might not have broken loose at
the time it actually did, but perhaps also not without the Stalin-Hitler Pact,
or without the deepening of the worldwide depression, which set definite limits
to the Nazis’ internal economic policies, on which their political dominance
depended. It is clear, however, that Hitler cannot be blamed for World War I or
for the Great Depression preceding World War II. Governments are composed of
individuals, representing definite ideologies and specific economic interests,
for which reason it is always possible to give credit, or to put the blame, for
any particular policy on individual politicians, and to assume that had they not
been there, history would have run a different course. This might even be true,
but the different course would in no way affect the general development insofar
as it is determined by capitalist production relations.

In brief, it is not possible to make any reliable predictions with regard to
historical development on the strength of political movements and the role of
individuals within these movements as they are thrown up by the development of
capitalism and its difficulties, so long as these occurrences do not concern the
basic social production relations but only reflect changes within these
relations. It is true that political and economic phenomena constitute an
entity, but to speak of such an entity may be to refer to no more than erratic
movements within the given social structure, and not to social contradictions
destined to destroy the given political and economic entity by way of
revolutionary changes that bring another society into existence. Just as there
is no way to foresee economic development in its details, that is, at what point
a crisis will be released or be overcome, there is also no way to account for
political development in its details, that is, which social movement will
succeed or fail, or what individual will come to dominate the political scene
and whether or not this individual will appear as a “history-making” individual,
quite apart from his personal qualifications. What cannot be comprehended cannot
be taken into consideration, and political as well as economic events appear as
a series of “accidents” or “shocks,” seemingly from outside the system but
actually produced by this system, which precludes the recognition of its
inherent necessities. The very existence of political life attests to its
fetishistic determination. Outside this fetishistic determination, this helpless
and blind subjection to the capital-expansion process, the entity of politics
and economics would not appear as such, but rather as the elimination of both in
a consciously arranged organization of the social requirements of the
reproduction process, freed of its economic and political aspects. Politics, and
with it, that type of economy which is necessarily political economy, will cease
with the establishment of a classless society.

That even Lenin was somehow aware of this may be surmised by his reluctance
to use the term “wage labor” after the seizure of power. Only once, in deference
to an international audience, at the founding Congress of the Third
International in March 1919, did he speak of “mankind throwing off the last form
of slavery: capitalist or wage slavery.” Generally, however, he made it appear
that the end of private capital implies the end of the wage system; although not
automatically abolishing the wage system in a technical sense, it would free it
from its exploitative connotations. In this respect, as in many others, Lenin
merely harked back to Kautsky’s position of 1902, which maintained that in the
early stages of the construction of socialism wage labor, and therefore money,
(or vice versa) must be retained in order to provide the workers with the
necessary incentives to work. Trotsky, too, reiterated this idea, but with an
exemplary shamelessness, stating that

we still retain, and for a long time will retain, the system of
wages. The farther we go, the more will its importance become simply to
guarantee to all members of society all the necessaries of life; and thereby
it will cease to be a system of wages. [But] in the present difficult period
the system of wages is for us, first and foremost, not a method for
guaranteeing the personal existence of any separate worker, but a method of
estimating what the individual worker brings with his labor to the Labor
Republic.... Finally, when it rewards some (through the wage system), the
Labor State cannot but punish others – those who are clearly infringing labor
solidarity, undermining the common work, and seriously impairing the Socialist
renaissance of the country. Repression for the attainment of economic ends is
a necessary weapon of the Socialist dictatorship.(16)

As the wage system is the basis of capitalist production, so it remains the
basis of “socialist construction,” which first allows people like Lenin and
Trotsky, and their state apparatus, not only to assume the position but also to
speak in the voice of the capitalists when dealing with the working class. As if
the wage system had not always been the only guarantee for the workers to earn a
livelihood, and as if it had not always been used to estimate the amount of
surplus value to be extracted from their work!

As a theory of the proletarian revolution, Marxism does not recognize
alterations within unchanged social production relations as historical changes
in the sense of the materialist conception of history. It speaks of changes of
social development from slavery to serfdom to wage labor, and of the abolition
of the latter, and therewith all forms of labor exploitation, in a classless
socialist society. Each type of class society will have its own political
history, of course, but Marxism recognizes this as the politics of definite
social formations, which will, however, come to an end with the abolition of
classes, the last political revolution in the general social developmental
process. Quite apart from its objective possibility or impossibility, the
Bolshevik regime had no intention to abolish the wage system and was therefore
not engaged in furthering a social revolution in the Marxian sense. It was
satisfied with the abolition of private control over the accumulation of
capital, on the assumption that this would suffice to proceed to a consciously
planned economy and, eventually, to a more egalitarian system of distribution.
It is true, of course, that the possibility of such an endeavor had not occurred
to Marx, for whom the capitalist system, in its private-property form, would
have to be replaced by a system in which the producers themselves would take
collective and direct control of the means of production. From this point of
view, the Bolshevik endeavor, through a historical novelty not contemplated by
Marx, still falls within the history of the capitalist mode of production.

By adhering to the Marxist ideology evolved within the Second International,
Lenin and the Bolsheviks succeeded in identifying their inversion of Marxian
theory as the only possible form of its realization. While the Bolshevik concept
implied no more than the formation of a state-capitalist system, this had been
the way in which, at the turn of the century, socialism had been quite generally
understood. It is therefore not possible to accuse the Bolsheviks of a
"betrayal” of the then prevailing “Marxist” principles; on the contrary, they
actualized the declared goals of the Social Democratic movement, which itself
had lost all interest in acting upon its beliefs. What the Bolsheviks did was to
realize the program of the Second International by revolutionary means. However,
in doing so, that is, by turning the ideology into practice and giving it
concrete substance, they identified revolutionary Marxism with the
state-directed socialist society envisioned by the orthodox wing of
international Social Democracy.

Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, the bourgeoisie had looked upon Marxism as
a meaningless utopia, contrary to the naturally given market relations and to
human nature itself. There was of course the class struggle, but this, too, like
competition in general, implied no more than the Darwinian struggle for
existence, which justified its suppression or amelioration, as the case might
be, in accordance with changing circumstances or opportunities. But the very
fact of the existence of the bourgeoisie was proof enough that society could not
prevail without class divisions, as its very complexity demanded its
hierarchical structure. Socialism, in the Marxian sense of the
self-determination of the working class, was not a practical possibility and its
advocacy was not only stupid but also criminal, for its realization would
destroy not only capitalist society but society itself. The adaptation of the
reformist labor movement to the realities of social life and its successful
integration into the capitalist system was additional proof that the capital-labor
relations were the normal social relations, which could not be tampered
with except at the price of social decay.

This argument was put aside by the Bolshevik demonstration that it is
possible to have “socialism” on the basis of capital-labor relations and that a
social hierarchy could be maintained without the bourgeoisie, simply by turning
the latter into servants of the state, the sole proprietor of the social
capital. Although Marx had said that capitalism presupposes the capitalist, this
need not imply the capitalist as bourgeois, as owner of private capital, for the
capital concentration and centralization process indicated the diminishing of
their numbers and the increasing monopolization of capital. If there was an
“end” to this process, it would be the end of private capital, as the property
of many capitalists, and the end of market economy, which would issue into the
complete monopoly of ownership of the means of production. This might as well be
in the hands of the state, which would then become the organizer of social
production in a system in which “market relations” were reduced to the exchange
between labor and capital through the maintenance of wage labor in the
state-controlled economy. This concept might have made “socialism”
comprehensible to the bourgeoisie, were it not for the fact that it involved
their abolition as a ruling class. From the bourgeois point of view, it was
quite immaterial whether they found themselves expropriated by a state, which
was no longer their own, or by a proletarian revolution in the Marxian sense,
that is, the appropriation of the means of production by the working class. The
Bolshevik state-capitalist, or, what amounts to the same, state-socialist
concept was consequently equated with the Marxian concept of socialism. When the
bourgeoisie speaks of Marxism, it invariably refers to its Bolshevik
interpretation, as this is the only one that has found concrete application.
This identification of Marxism with the Leninist concept of socialism turned the
latter into a synonym for Marxism, and as such it has dominated the character of
all revolutionary and national-revolutionary movements down to the present day.

Whereas for the bourgeoisie Bolshevism and Marxism meant the same thing,
Social Democracy could not possibly identify the Leninist regime as a socialist
state, even though it had realized its own long-forgotten goal of reaching
socialism via the capture of state power. Yet because Bolshevism had
expropriated the bourgeoisie, it was equally impossible to refer to it as a
capitalist system, without acknowledging that even legal conquest of the state
by parliamentary means need not lead to a socialist system of production.
Hilferding, for one, resolved the problem simply by announcing that Bolshevism
was neither capitalism nor socialism, but a societal form best described as a
“totalitarian state economy,” a system based on an “unlimited personal
dictatorship.” (17) It was no longer determined by the character of its economy
but by the personal notions of the omnipotent dictator. Denying his own
long-held concept of “organized capitalism” as the inevitable result of the
capital concentration process, and the consequent disappearance of the law of
value as the regulator of the capitalist economy, Hilferding now insisted that
from an economic point of view state-capitalism cannot exist. Once the state has
become the sole owner of the means of production, he said, it renders impossible
the functions of the capitalist economy because it abolishes the very mechanism
which accounts for the economic circulation process by way of competition on
which the law of value operates. But while this state of affairs had once been
equated with the rise of socialism, it was now perceived as a totalitarian
society equally removed from both capitalism and socialism. The one ingredient
that excluded its tra"sformation into socialism was the absence of political
democracy. But if this were so, Hilferding was fundamentally in agreement with
Lenin on the assumption that it is possible to institute socialism by political
means, although there was no agreement as to the particular political means to
be employed. In fact, Lenin was very much indebted to Hilferding, save in his
rejection of the means of formal democracy as the criterion for the socialist
nature of the state-controlled economy.

In this respect it is noteworthy that neither Lenin nor Hilferding had any
concern for the social production relations as capital-labor relations, but
merely for the character of the government presiding over the “new society.” In
the opinion of both, it was the state that must control society, whether by
democratic or dictatorial means; the working class was to be the obedient
instrument of governmental policies. Just the same, it was Lenin’s concept of
“dictatorship” that carried the day, for the Bolsheviks had seized power,
whereas Hilferding’s “democracy” was slowly eroded by the authoritarian
tendencies arising within the capitalist system. Besides, the “Marxism” of the
Second International had lost its plausibility at the eve of World War I,
whereas the success of the Bolshevik Revolution could be seen as a return to the
revolutionary theory and practice of Marxism. This situation assured the rising
prominence of the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, as dependent on the
existence of a vanguard party not only for seizing power but also for securing
the transition from capitalism to socialism. At any rate, in the course of time
the Leninist conception of Marxism came to dominate that part of the
international labor movement which saw itself as an anti-capitalist and
anti-imperialist force.

We have dealt with Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution in some detail in
order to bring out two specific points: first, that the policies of the
Bolshevik regime subsequent to Lenin’s death had their cause in the prevailing
situation in Russia and the world at large as well as in the political concepts
of the Leninist party; and second, that the result of this combination of
factors implied a second and apparently “final” destruction of the labor
movement as a Marxist movement. World War I and its support by the socialist
parties of the Second International signified a defeat of Marxism as a
potentially revolutionary workers’ movement. The war and its aftermath led to a
temporary revival of revolutionary activities for limited reformist goals, which
indicated the workers’ unreadiness to dislodge the capitalist system. Only in
Russia did the revolutionary upheavals go beyond mere governmental changes, by
playing the means of production – not at once, but gradually – into the hands of
the Bolshevik party-state. But this apparent success implied a total inversion
of Marxian theory and its willful transformation into the ideology of
state-capitalism, which, by its very nature, restricts itself to the
nation-state and its struggle for existence and expansion in a world of
competing imperialist nations and power blocs.

The concept of world revolution as the expected result of the imperialist
war, which seemingly prompted the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power, was dependent
upon Lenin’s notion of the indispensable existence of a vanguard party, able to
grasp the opportunity for the overthrow of the bourgeois state, and capable of
avoiding, or correcting, the otherwise aimless squandering of spontaneously
released revolutionary energies on the part of the rebellious masses. Aside from
the Russian Bolsheviks, however, no vanguard party of the Leninist type existed
anywhere, so that this first presupposition for a successful socialist
revolution could not be met. In the light of Lenin’s own theory, it was
therefore logically inconsistent to await the extension of the Russian into an
international revolution. But even if such vanguard parties could have been
created overnight, so to speak, their goals would have been determined by the
Leninist concept of the state and its functions in the social transformation
process. If successful, there would have been more than one state-capitalist
system but no international socialist revolution. In short, there would have
been accomplished at an earlier time what actually came to pass after World War
II without a revolution, namely the imperialistic division of the world into
monopolistic and state-capitalistic national systems under the aegis of unstable
power blocs.

Assuming for the sake of argument that revolutions in Western Europe had gone
beyond purely political changes and had led to a dictatorship of the
proletariat, exercised through a system of soviets controlling economic social
relations, such a system would have found itself in opposition to the
party-state in its Leninist incarnation. Most probably, it would have led to a
revival of Russia’s internal opposition to the Bolshevik power monopoly and to
the dethroning of its leadership. A proletarian revolution in the Marxian sense
would have endangered the Bolshevik regime even more than would a bourgeois and
social democratic counter-revolution, because for the Bolsheviks the spreading
of the revolution was conceivable only as the expansion of the Bolshevik
Revolution and the maintenance of its specific characteristics on a global
scale. This was one of the reasons why the Third International, as a “tool of
world revolution,” was turned into an international replica of the Leninist
party.

This particular practice was based on Lenin’s theory of imperialism. More
polemical than theoretical in character, Lenin’s Imperialism : The Highest
Stage of Capitalism paid more attention to the fleeting political aspects of
imperialism than to its underlying socioeconomic dynamics. It was intended to
unmask the imperialist character of the first world war, seen as the general
condition for social revolution. Lenin’s arguments were substantiated by
relevant data from various bourgeois sources, by a critical utilization of the
theoretical findings of J. H. Hobson and Rudolf Hilferding, and by a rejection
of Karl Kautsky’s speculative theory of superimperialism as a way toward a
peaceful capitalism. The data and the theories were bound up with a particular
historical stage of capitalist development and contained no clues regarding its
further course.

The compulsion to imperialism is inherent in capitalist production, but it is
the development of the latter which accounts for its specific manifestations at
any particular time. For Lenin, however, capitalism became imperialistic “only
at a definite and very high stage of capitalistic development,” a stage that
implied the rule of national and international monopolies which, by agreement or
force, divided the world’s exploitable resources among themselves. In his view,
this period is characterized not so much by the export of commodities as by that
of capital, which allows the big imperialist powers, and a part of their
laboring populations, an increasingly parasitical existence at the expense of
the subjugated regions of the world. He perceived this situation as the “highest
stage” of capitalism because he expected that its manifold contradictions would
lead directly to social revolutions on an international scale.

However, although World War I led to the Russian Revolution, imperialism was
not the “eve of the proletarian world revolution.” What is noteworthy here
nonetheless is the continuity between Lenin’s early work on the development of
Russian capitalism and his theory of imperialism and the impending world
revolution. Against the Narodniks, as we saw, Lenin held that capitalism would
be the next step in Russia’s development and that, for that reason, the
industrial proletariat would come to play the dominant role in the Russian
revolution. But by involving not only the workers, but also the peasants and even
layers of the bourgeoisie, the revolution would have the character of a
"people’s revolution.” To realize all its potentialities, it would have to be
led by an organization representing the socialism of the working class. Lenin’s
theory of imperialism as “the eve of world revolution” was thus a projection of
his theory of the Russian revolution onto the world at large. Just as in Russia
different classes and nationalities were to combine under proletarian leadership
to overthrow the autocracy, so on an international scale whole nations, at
various stages of development, are to combine under the leadership of the Third
International to liberate themselves from both their imperialistic masters and
their native ruling classes. The world revolution is thus one of subjugated
classes and nations against a common enemy – monopolist imperialism. It was this
theory that, in Stalin’s view, made “Leninism the Marxism of the age of
imperialism.” However, based on the presupposition of successful socialist
revolutions in the advanced capitalist nations, the theory could not be proven
right or worng as the expected revolutions did not materialize.

This truly grandiose scheme, which puts Bolshevism in the center of the world
revolutionary process and, to speak in Hegellan terms, made the Weltgeist
manifest itself in Lenin and his party, remained a mere expression of Lenin’s
imaginary powers, for with every step he took the “greatest of
Realpolitiker” found himself at odds with reality. Just as he had to
jettison his own agrarian program in exchange for that of his Social
Revolutionary opponents, to rid himself of the “natural economy” practiced with
devastating results during the period of “war communism” and fall back to market
relations in the New Economic Policy, and to wage war against the
self-determination of oppressed nationalities at first so generously granted by
the Bolshevik regime, so he saw himself forced to construct and utilize the
Third International not for the extension of the international revolution but
for no more than the defense of the Bolshevik state. His internationalism, like
that of the bourgeoisie, could only serve national ends, camouflaged as general
interests of the world revolution. But perhaps it was this total failure to
further the declared goods of Bolshevism that really attests to Lenin’s mastery
of Realpolitik, if only in the sense that an unprincipled opportunism did
indeed serve the purpose of maintaining the Bolsheviks in power.

Lenin’s single-mindedness in gaining and keeping state power by way of
compromises and opportunistic reversals, as dictated by circumstances outside
his control, was not a practice demanded by Marxist theory but an empirical
pragmatism such as characterizes bourgeois politics in general. The professional
revolutionary turned into a statesman vying with other statesmen to defend the
specific interests of the Bolshevik state as those of the Russian nation. Any
further revolutionary development was now seen as depending on the protection of
the first “workers’ state,” which thus became the foremost duty of the
international proletariat. The Marxist ideology served not only internal but
also external purposes by assuring working-class support for Bolshevik Russia.
To be sure, this involved only part of the labor movement, but it was that part
which could disrupt the anti-Bolshevik forces, which now included the old
socialist parties and the trade unions. The Leninist interpretation of Marxism
became the whole of Marxian theory, as a counter-ideology to all forms of
anti-Bolshevism and all attempts to weaken or to destroy the Russian government.
Simultaneously, however, attempts were also made to bring about a state of
coexistence with the capitalist adversaries. Various concessions were proposed
to demonstrate the mutual advantages to be gained through international trade
and other means of collaboration. This two-faced policy served the single end of
preserving the Bolshevik state by serving the national interests of Russia.

Notes

4. Lord Moran reports the following dialogue between Churchill and Stalin in
Moscow in 1942: Churchill: “When I raised the question of the collective farms
and the struggle with the kulaks, Stalin became very serious. I asked him if it
was as bad as the war. ’Oh, yes,’ he answered, ’Worse. Much worse. It went on
for years. Most of them were liquidated by the peasants, who hated them. Ten
millions of them. But we had to do it to mechanize agriculture. In the end,
production from the land was doubled. What is a generation?’ Stalin demanded as
he paced up and down the length of the table.” C .Moran, Churchill: The Struggle
for Survival, 1940-1965 (Boston: Houghton, 1966), p. 70.

5. Lenin, Program of the CPSU (B), adopted 22 March 1919 at the Eighth
Congress of the Party.

6. Stalin’s Constitution of 1936 reestablished the universal right to vote,
but combined it with a number of controls that preclude the election to state
institutions of anyone not favored by the Communist Party, thus demonstrating
that universal franchise and dictatorship can exist simultaneously.

7. Trotsky, Dictatorship vs. Democracy (New York, 1922), pp. 107-9.

8. Trotsky, undoubtedly as outstanding a revolutionary politician as Lenin,
is nonetheless of no interest with respect to the Bolshevik Revolution, either
as a theoretician or as a practical actor, because of his total submission to
Lenin, which allowed him to play a great role in the seizure of power and the
construction of the Bolshevik state. Prior to his unconditional deference to
Lenin, Trotsky opposed both the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, the first because
of their passive acceptance of the expected Russian Revolution as a
bourgeois revolution in the traditional sense, and the second because of Lenin’s
insistence on a “peasant-worker alliance,” which in Trotsky’s view could not
lead to a socialist revolution According to Trotsky, moreover, the socialist
revolution, dominated by the industrial proletariat, cannot be contemplated at
all within the framework of a national revolution, but must from the start be
approached as an international revolution, unitinp the Russian revolution with
revolutions in Western Europe, that is, as a “permanent revolution” under the
hegemony of the working class. Changing over to Lenin’s ideas and their apparent
validity in the context of the Russian situation, Trotsky became the prisoner of
a dogmatized Leninism and thus unable to evolve a Marxist critique of the
Bolshevik Revolution.

11. H.H. Fisher, “Soviet Policies in Asia,” in The Annals of the American A
cademy of Political and Social Science (May 1949), p. 190.

12. “On the Slogan for a United States of Europe” (1915), in Collected Works,
Vol 21(Moscow: Progress, 1964), p. 342.

13. This found its expression in the program adopted by the sailors,
soldiers, and workers of Kronstadt: 1) Immediate new elections to the soviets.
The present soviets no longer express the wishes of the workers and peasants.
The new elections should be by secret ballot, and should be preceded by free
electorial propaganda. 2) Freedom of speech and of the press for workers and
peasants, for the Anarchists, and for the left socialist parties. 3) The right
of assembly, and freedom of trade union and peasant organizations. 4) The
organization, at the latest on 10th March 1921, of a conference of non-party
workers, soldiers and sailors of Petrograd, Kronstadt and the Petrograd
district. 5) The liberation of all political prisoners of the socialist parties,
and of all imprisoned workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors belonging to
working class and peasant organizations. 6) The election of a commission to look
into the dossiers of all those detained in prisons and concentration camps. 7)
The abolition of all political sections in the armed forces. No political party
should have privileges for the propagation of its ideas, or receive State
subsidies to this end. In the place of the political sections, various cultural
groups should be set up, deriving resources from the State. 8) The immediate
abolition of the militia detachments set up between towns and countryside. 9)
The equalization of rations for all workers, except those engaged in dangerous
or unhealthy jobs. 10) The abolition of party combat detachments in all military
groups. The abolition of party guards in factories and enterprises. If guards
are required, they should be nominated, taking into account the views of the
workers. 11) The granting to the peasants of freedom of action on their own soil
and the right to own cattle, provided they look after them themselves and do not
employ hired labor. 12) We request that all military units and officer trainee
groups associate themselves with this resolution 13) We demand the press give
proper publicity to this resolution 14) We demand that handicraft production be
authorized provided it does not utilize wage labor. Quoted by Ida Mett, The
Kronstadt Commune (London: Solidarity, 1967), pp. 6-7. For a detailed history of
the Kronstadt rebellion, see Paul Avrich, Kronstadt, 1921 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1970).